Keywords

Introduction

For years, if not decades, grand theoretical debates on International Relations have been reduced to a handy hermeneutic tool, apt only for teaching purposes when first exposing undergraduate students to IR theory. Other than that, they have lost their capacity to capture our theoretical imaginations. According to the old canonical view, theories in IR amounted to entire worldviews—broad explanations about the nature of international relations. These isms engaged in a virtually endless debate with other worldviews. The dramatis personae of such acts included realists and liberals of different sorts, as well as constructivists and other reflective and sociological approaches. The plot was built around “paradigm wars” (Jackson and Nexon 2013), i.e. theoretical trench and manoeuvre operations designed to demonstrate the alleged theoretical superiority of one worldview over the others.

This was always a grossly simplified picture of course, but increasingly it has been seen as an unfaithful and dysfunctional representation of what IR theories are and what they are for. To be sure, grand theoretical fault lines are semi-institutionalized by the existence of relatively autonomous research networks and outlets. However, scholarly practices have long evolved into something else, with scholars conceiving of a theory as being a much narrower and more hybrid product. Researchers have quite freely embraced a post-foundational (Bohman 2009) understanding of their work, in which hypotheses affiliated to different isms are combined in middle-range theories (Jackson and Nexon 2013) to account for specific empirical phenomena. This process has consisted of at least three intertwined trends: the virtual end of debates between isms; an emphasis on middle-range explanations of empirically bounded phenomena; and an openness to consider hypotheses associated with diverse grand theoretical traditions.

In this chapter, we explore whether the war in Ukraine has changed this. Given the immensity of both the war and its implications for the international order, have scholars (and think tankers) gone back to the roots? Have they reverted back to the conceptual and normative consistency of grand theories to make sense of events? Furthermore, have they been more prone to compare or defend the analytical performance of their own school of thought relative to others? There are reasons to think isms and debates among them are back. The Russian invasion (and the vast programme of Western assistance to Ukraine) is an event of world-historical scale that seemingly is putting the great gears of history back into motion. They never stopped of course, but the war in Ukraine has surely focused scholars’ attention on the basic driving forces of history, on its alleged cyclical nature (according to realists), and on the possibility of progress—all old acquaintances of grand theoretical debates in IR. From a narrower point of view, the return of full-fledged inter-state war, and the possibility of a great-power war, returns IR to its post-World War I roots, and to the sort of issues that grand theories were designed to address: the nature of international relations and of the international order. Finally, grand theories might provide scholars with useful rules of thumb when evaluating the war from a normative and explanatory point of view.

There are also reasons to think that the war should lead to a major debate on its impact upon the EU (see the chapters by Jørgensen and Smith, in this volume)—and vice versa on the role of the EU in shaping the war and the context in which this would take place. As argued in the introductory chapter to this volume, “the war […] has questioned the idea to live in perpetual peace without any need to fund a military” and has forced the EU to consider the possibility that the ideas of ‘building peace without weapons’ and ‘change through trade’ have failed (Wiesner and Knodt, this volume). Also the fact that the war “underlines we are living a multipolar world order –geopolitically, economically, ideologically and legally” (Íbid.) should have led to a reflection on the implications for the EU and on the role of the EU in multipolarity.

One and a half years (barely) into the war, we conduct a systematic review of publications about the war in IR scholarly journals, including policy-oriented outlets whenever scholars or think tankers have published in them. In order to grasp the extent to which the war in Ukraine has brought grand theoretical divides into IR scholarship, we assess two variables in published works by scholars. First, we assess whether authors keep grand theoretical discipline, understood here as the consistent use of arguments associated with one tradition of thought (as opposed to juggling with arguments coming from several of them). Second, we also check for references to other grand theories in ways that suggest the existence of an active debate between them.

A secondary aim of this chapter is to grasp the place of the EU and of European authors in this debate. We build here on Knud Erik Jørgensen’s chapter in this volume—or rather look at the reverse of his argument. If “European Studies has in general been eminent in excluding research on war as such” (Jørgensen, in this volume), is at least scholarly production on the war in Ukraine addressing its implications for the EU, or the role of the EU in it? Have EU scholars taken part in this debate?

The text proceeds as follows: Sect. “Grand Theoretical Debates” briefly addresses the role of grand theoretical debates in IR and its recent status; Sect. “Methods” presents the sample of publications and other methodological considerations; Sect. “Mapping the Debate” overviews and discusses the empirical material; and the last section draws some conclusions and reflects upon the limits of this exercise.

Grand Theoretical Debates

Grand theories, or isms, and particularly debates between them, were once the most usual way in which IR scholars made sense of theorization in International Relations. Theoretical development was “largely […] understood through the prism of the great debates”, a feature that coexisted with the identification of their mystifications, misrepresentations or outright invention (Dunne et al. 2013).

However, the traction of those debates has declined very significantly. A decade ago, the then editors of the theoretically inclined European Journal of International Relations argued that during their tenure “we saw less and less inter-theoretic debate across paradigms (or isms)” (Dunne et al. 2013). Actually grand theories themselves as organizers of analytical apparatuses in research (not only debates among isms) were in decline. According to one account, “the percentage of non-paradigmatic research [had] steadily increased from 30% in 1980 to 50% in 2006” (Maliniak et al. 2011). Only in the field of teaching did they maintain their status as arrangers of arguments into neatly delineated, easy to convey theoretical propositions.

What has taken their place has been variously qualified as middle-range theorization (of a non-paradigmatic sort, i.e. combining variables drawn from different worldviews), or as theory or hypothesis testing. These are different things: middle-range theorization includes theory development, not only testing. However, the overall trajectory is clear: theories (and associated hypotheses) here refer to explanations or interpretations of sets of phenomena that are narrower than those addressed by omni-comprehensive isms. Scholars are also much less interested in foundational consistence—i.e. in consistently deriving their propositions from such isms. In their sweeping evaluation of the state of theorization in the 2010s, Dunne, Hansen and Wight argued as much: “the paradigm wars, if that is the correct term, are now over, and the discipline seems to have settled into a period of ‘theoretical peace’” in which “various forms of pluralism” are embraced by authors, opening “a period of theory testing” (Dunne et al. 2013).

This has been both called for, celebrated, and decried. Famously, David Lake used his 2010 Presidential address at the ISA Conference to castigate isms. In his view, they had led to “professional practices that produce five linked pathologies”. IR scholars had (i) reified “research traditions”; (ii) “reward[ed] extremism” within them; (iii) mistaken them “for actual theories”; (iv) “narrow[ed] the permitted subject matter” of research “to those topics, periods, and observations that tend to confirm the particular strengths of [one’s] tradition”; and (v) “aspire[d] for their approach to be the scientific paradigm” (Lake 2011, our emphasis). The combined result had been the transformation of grand theories “into insular sects that eschew explanation in favor of theology” (Lake 2011). Hence, his call was for IR scholarship to focus on “contingent, mid-level theories of specific phenomena” in which the “basic and common concepts of interests, interactions, and institutions” would act as a shared language that allowed for “analytic eclecticism” (Lake 2011). Mearsheimer and Walt were much less sanguine on the wisdom of abandoning paradigms altogether, which was leading to “simplistic hypothesis testing” in the search for “well-verified empirical evidence” (Mearsheimer and Walt 2013). This was not mid-level theorization, but the mere testing of incoherent sets of variables with the help of effort-intensive, but poor-quality, data (Mearsheimer and Walt 2013).

With the risk of enacting exactly this latter possibility, this chapter considers the hypothesis that grand theories and debates among them might have made a comeback with the Russian full-fledged invasion of Ukraine. We raise three reasons that would justify interrogating this expectation. First, the return of inter-state wars of annexation might have rekindled interest in paradigms whose origin (real or mythical) was precisely associated with different interpretations of such wars. Second, and more broadly, the feeling that the end of history is over, i.e. that great-power competition and possibly great-power war is again at the centre of international relations, might have also had this same effect. Big questions about history, progress, war and order might lead scholars to revisit paradigms as handy catalogues of well-articulated arguments. Finally, isms contain normative, interpretative, explanatory and even implicitly predictive ingredients that, far from the view that sees theories as detached from reality (and hard empirical evidence as closer to policy relevance), might in fact provide useful rules of thumb when trying to make sense of events of world-historical scale.

Methods

To assess this hypothesis, we have conducted a systematic analysis of articles written by IR scholars and think tankers and published both in scholarly and policy journals in the field. The selection of articles has not been straightforward. First, we have excluded articles dealing exclusively with the pre-2022 phase of the war (the 2014 occupation of Crimea and the war in Donetsk and Lugansk). Perhaps more importantly, we have excluded a significant number of articles, particularly among those published more recently, which do not focus on the war and its implications, but use it, among other things, to illustrate much longer-lasting arguments. We will come back to this below. Table 2.1 portrays the sample of journals and articles.

Table 2.1 Sample of journals and number of articles
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Given the (currently) relatively small size of the sample, we restrict ourselves to identifying three broad isms only—while keeping an eye on the possibility of other theoretical traditions being present as well. Hence, we differentiate between realists, liberals and scholars adhered to sociological approaches—in full knowledge of the fact that there is great internal diversity within all three categories. The term “sociological approaches” might need more of an explanation. With it we refer to theories, such as Constructivism or the English School, that understand international politics as taking place within a society—the international society—composed of norms and institutions with which states engage, either in terms of socialization, compliance, contestation, or violation. Such norms and institutions are key when making sense of states’ evaluations of each other’s preferences and actions.

These three grand theoretical traditions hold different positions on three aspects of the war, to which we turn to grasp the explanatory, interpretative and perspective elements of isms in IR: (a) the causes of the war; (b) the stakes it raises; and (c) what should be done about it—particularly in the West, inasmuch as the sampled journals are Western ones. Hence, in our review of the literature about the Russian war in Ukraine, we establish the grand theoretical affiliation of each article for each of these three aspects. Table 2.2 presents the expected arguments for each of the three worldviews in each of those aspects.

Table 2.2 Worldviews on the war
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Our coding of articles allows us to assess two different variables. First, we are interested in grasping to which extent scholars and think tankers maintain paradigmatic discipline, namely the consistent use of arguments derived from one single worldview about the causes of the war, its stakes, and associated prescriptions. Eclectically mixing propositions that belong to different isms would point to a disregard of paradigms as being fundamental to reflection about the war; adhering to consistently realist, liberal or sociological tenets would signal an appreciation of their analytical fruitfulness. We also want to understand whether paradigmatic discipline leads to explicit competition with other grand theories for theoretical superiority. Hence, we look for references to other grand theories and more particularly to references of a comparative or competitive sort. In addition, we also pay attention to the question of whether the EU is the focus of any of the sampled publications, as well as to the extent to which EU and more broadly European-affiliated authors participate in the debate on the war in ways that are distinguishable from the overall pattern, in terms of paradigmatic discipline and engagement with other isms.

Mapping the Debate

General Features

As shown in Table 2.1, the total number of articles is modest, perhaps because the debate is still in its infancy. This could be attributed to the slow speed of scholarly writing and publishing, and the fact that policy journals (Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy) have been more responsive than academic ones does point in this direction. However, it does seem that more is happening here.

On many occasions, particularly in scholarly journals, articles on the war do not convey much in the way of a sense of novelty or shock (neither is there any indication about its flip side: denying that there is anything fundamentally new or shocking about the war). This is especially true when compared with previous recent waves of publications about other order-shattering events. COVID-19 or the election of Donald Trump in 2016 were broadly seen as phenomena that revealed new information about the international system or pushed it in new directions. Although not completely absent, this response seems to be much less the case in our sample of articles on the war. February 2022 marked a departure from the post-1945 international order, but wars of annexation are hardly alien to IR as an intellectual endeavour. Hence, the war in Ukraine is seen as pertaining to well-trodden categories such as inter-state war, organized violence, great-power competition, or the making, or unmaking, of international orders, for which different grand theoretical traditions already have well-articulated research agendas. The invasion of February 2022 is then variously seen as a test, a refutation of, or a way to fine-tune, off-the-shelf hypotheses. In their piece for International Affairs, for instance, Boaz Atzili and Min Jung Kim look at Ukraine as a case of buffer zone, a term that they demarcate, organize and apply to a broad range of examples (Atzili and Kim 2023). Pål Røren looks at the effects of the war on the status of Russia in different “social clubs” (Røren 2023). This seems to portray the negative image of the insight by Knud Erik Jørgensen (this issue) on the irrelevance of war for European Studies. In our case, it is not irrelevance but familiarity that seems to drive the relative nonchalance of scholarly contributions. Appreciation of its novelty probably falls into the gap between both attitudes.

On other occasions, this familiarity of IR with war explains the fact that articles ostensibly devoted to the war in Ukraine (and obviously relevant to its understanding) rely on analytical apparatuses, and sometimes even empirical materials, that are clearly independent of the war or even possibly predate February 2022. This is the case of Míla O’Sullivan and Kateřina Krulišová (2023) on the issue of Women, Peace and Security in the “non-region” of Central and Eastern Europe, for instance. We would also claim that the well-established role of war in the literature stands behind the fact that many articles look at the Russian war in Ukraine in narrow, specific terms, instead of posing broad, generalistic questions about it and its implications. Examples abound, but three might suffice here. Melnychenko et al. (2022) explore the consequences of the war for Polish-Ukrainian trade relations; Juliet Kaarbo et al. (2023) interrogate the counterfactual of how Donald Trump would have reacted to the invasion; and Dara Massicot (2023) explores Russian mistakes at the beginning of the war.

Arguments do tend to fit the expectations presented in Table 2.2, even if each article focuses on developing a specific case. Admittedly, our expectations were not independent of our own active following of the debate as it unfolded during these months, but they are well in line with the theoretical positions developed by their respective schools of thought. However, there are two issues we would like to raise on the ways in which arguments seem to play out in the sampled articles.

First, of the three worldviews, liberalism and sociological approaches are the most difficult to disentangle in practice. To be sure, they differ in their ontologies (based on atomistic or social actors, respectively), which leads them to different interpretations of change, motives, institutions and order. In practice, however, we do not see this divide transcend into neatly differentiated assessments of the war. They can share arguments about its causes and stakes, and about what the West and the US should do. In other words, rightly or wrongly, defending (Ukrainian) democracy because it makes the international order safer for other democracies is on occasions combined with an urge to help defend the (Ukrainian) victim of a war of aggression because of the need to protect the idea of the outlawry of war, the linchpin of the international order. The former argument leans towards the liberal, the latter is of a sociological kind, but they are obviously close to each other. Similarly, one can think simultaneously that Russia’s invasion was the act of an autocrat (a liberal explanation based on domestic regime type), and also that of an old-school imperialist with no respect for the understanding of sovereignty that underpins the order built after 1945 (a sociological explanation based on clashing views over constitutive norms).

Second, it is rather striking how little has been published about the war in Ukraine beyond the three mainstream worldviews. O’Sullivan and Krulišovás’ decolonial feminist piece is the only unambiguous exception we have spotted. This might be due to our choice of outlets (although they are diverse in their own ways too), but it also reflects the preponderance of publications from policy journals and the fact that contributions in scholarly journals are still few and far between. One might be forgiven for concluding that under these circumstances, at least during the initial stages of a crisis like this, some journals tend to seek contributions by well-known (mainstream) scholars.

We turn now to a brief exploration of the arguments found in our sample of articles, over the main cause of the war, the stakes it raises, and what the West or the US should do about it.

Main Cause of the War

Sampled articles contain the three broad causes of war as presented above, along, respectively, realist, liberal and sociological lines. The quintessential realist take is presented by Stephen Walt, when he argues that “the final lesson –and arguably the most important- is that this war would have been far less likely if the United States had adopted a strategy of foreign-policy restraint”, as in that case “Russia’s incentive to invade would have been greatly reduced” (Walt 2023a). Ashford has made a similar case, although cloaked in a less assertive language, by arguing that the war in Ukraine is “at least a clear failure of US policy decisions over the last few decades to maintain peace in Europe”, and that it would be unreasonable to say that US policies in Eastern Europe “played no role at all in the run-up to the war”. According to her, such policies “contributed to a toxic stew of political disputes, security fears, and imperialist ambition that ultimately brought the region to the brink of war” (Ashford 2023).

The liberal argument on the cause of the war revolves around societal and political features both in Russia and Ukraine. Hence Fukuyama’s association of the war with the fact that “Putin claimed that Ukraine did not have an identity separate from that of Russia [while Ukraine’s] citizens are loyal to the idea of an independent, liberal democratic Ukraine and do not want to live in a corrupt dictatorship imposed from without” (Fukuyama 2022). Regime type plays a critical role in this logic. Autocratic regimes, Dylan, Gioe and Grossfeld argue, have “a persistent wartime mindset, manifest in zero-sum thinking, an almost conspirational understanding of Western power and intentions, and a tendency to act and accept high levels of risk” (Dylan et al. 2022). According to this line of thought, then, only a democratic Russia could offer enduring, credible security guarantees to its neighbours.

Finally, authors of a sociological strand focus their analysis of the causes of war on the factors that can explain Russia’s disregard of the outlawry of war and annexation. That can come in a number of forms, normally pertaining to imperialist conceptions of sovereignty and identity. Hence, Kendall-Taylor and Kofman describe the war as “an imperialist endeavor rooted in the still unfolding collapse of the Soviet Union” and see Russia’s behaviour as being “far more interested in imperialist revanchism than in strategic stability” (Kendall-Taylor and Kofman 2022). For their part, Hill and Stent (2022) have located the root of the invasion in Putin’s belief that “it is Russia’s divine right to rule Ukraine”.

Stakes

According to realists, at stake are stability and peace among great powers, as the war in Ukraine “marks the return of contestation over spheres of influence in world politics” (Ashford 2023). From this point of view, recognizing Russia’s sphere of influence, or at least avoiding an armed clash over whether (parts of) Ukraine should be included in it, is of utmost importance. The risk of escalation and great-power war is too high, realists claim. Also at stake is the capacity of the US to focus on China, its main strategic rival. As argued by Walt, “the future course of the twenty-first century is not going to be determined by whether Kyiv or Moscow ends up controlling the territories they are currently fighting over, but rather by which countries control key technologies” (Walt 2023b), i.e. the technologies that are more likely to trigger the next revolution in military affairs.

For liberals, it is democracy and freedom that are at stake. “At this juncture in world history”, argues Cohen (2023), “a great deal of prosperity and freedom depend on Ukrainian victory and –equally important- Russian defeat”. Also Peabody claims that “Russia has reinvigorated the cause of liberal democracy”, as the invasion has presented a “clear choice between liberalism and autocracy” (Peabody 2023). Fukuyama expands the values at stake to include an open, liberal understanding of national identity that is not based on “fixed characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or religious heritage” (Fukuyama 2022).

Finally, for scholars and think tankers of a sociological orientation, the war will decide the fate of the post-1945 international order, understood as a collection of international norms and institutions, the linchpin of which is the prohibition of war. On a few occasions, this is actively distinguished from liberal arguments. Hill and Stent feel that Western debates on the war have been “muddied” by considerations over “whether democracies should line up against autocracies”. Instead, the message should have focused on the fact that “Russia has violated the territorial integrity of an independent state that has been recognized by the entire international community” (Hill and Stent 2023). Were Russia to succeed, “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states […] will be imperiled” (Hill and Stent 2023). Given how deep this threat is for the international order, sociologically oriented authors have seen it as compelling action by third parties: “the nature of Russia’s violation of the European security order has made the absence of a collective EU policy response unthinkable” (Maurer et al. 2023).

Key Prescriptions for the US/West

Finally, we address the prescriptions advanced by each of these authors for the US or the West more broadly—since these are Western scholars and publications. Again, the standard-bearer realist Stephen Walt poses the problem in its starkest version. There is an asymmetry of interests and motivation between the backers of Russia and Ukraine in the West, and this has shaped the behaviours of both sides and might determine the outcome of the war. Hence, even if “peace or a cease-fire may still be a long way off, […] thinking about how to shut [the war] down is in everyone’s interests, and especially Ukraine’s” (Walt 2023a). In any case, realists do not expect Russia to “become dramatically less threatening” even after the war (Kendall-Taylor and Kofman 2022). In that scenario, the West needs to notice the failure of engagement as a security strategy and opt for deterrence as a tool for stability, in a way that is compatible with the US focusing on China.

Liberals appear much more bellicose in defence of democracy against autocracy. The case for the former against the latter needs to be made explicitly and in terms of values. Hence the argument that Biden “will have to talk not about treaty obligations and NATO’s Article 5 but about America’s role in protecting free people from tyranny” (Traub 2022). Emphasis on the defence of democracy as a key value in foreign policy has perhaps paradoxically brought together liberals and neoconservatives, although the latter come to this conclusion from different initial assumptions. Kagan has argued that “great-power conflict and dictatorship have been the norm throughout human history, the liberal peace a brief aberration” (Kagan 2023). Hence, the US must use its power to “keep the natural forces of history at bay” (Kagan 2023).

Sociological approaches have focused on the need to defend the rules-based international order. Responding to the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a necessity to “reinforce the principle that an attack on another country cannot go unpunished” (Fix and Kimmage 2023). Since allowing norm violation to go unanswered would be just as deleterious for the norm as the violation itself, Western countries have a duty to help Ukraine defend itself from the aggressor and impose costs on the latter. Involving the United Nations system in doing so is also critical for order maintenance (Hill and Stent 2023).

Interestingly, there is little discussion of the EU in the sampled articles (see Table 2.3). Only five of the 25 articles address the issue, or even make non-passing references to the EU. Of those five, two deal with the EU as a market—and hence do not imply any departure from the traditional role of the EU as a civilian power; and still another consists of an analysis of the whole West as a block (Traub 2022). In other words, the sampled publications show preciously little interest in the impact of the war on the EU qua EU, or about the ways in which the EU takes part in the conflict. Actually, the clearest example of such arguments, and the only truly EU-focused piece under review, presents a message that emphasizes continuity, not change; namely that the reaction of the EU to the war is “the result of the regularized interactions of member states in an evolving collective foreign policy-making system over the past 50 years”, which has brought about the “key shared norm” of the “collective European responsibility to act” (Maurer et al. 2023).

Table 2.3 Mapping contributions
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Worldviews and Great Debates

Now we explore to what extent the arguments presented above are used with paradigm discipline, i.e. to what extent those that apply liberal arguments to causes, also apply them to stakes, or prescriptions. A large degree of alignment around the core tenets of worldviews would indicate that the war has reinvigorated them as organizers of the reflections of scholars and think tankers. We are also interested in whether authors present their arguments in contradistinction to those of other isms, or engage in comparisons, rebuttals, or rejoinders with other paradigms. Our starting point is Table 2.3, which summarizes our findings. Each contribution to the debate is listed chronologically, to allow for the identification of trends over time. For each article, we also assess its main line of thought on the causes, stakes and prescriptions of the war, whether they are aligned around the expectations for one single worldview and whether they engage with others.

We raise four arguments on the findings as reflected in the table.

First, there seems to be quite a lot of paradigm discipline right across the board. Realists, liberals and sociologically oriented authors tend to operate within the logic of their own worldviews, aligning their assessments of causes, stakes and prescriptions. Out of 26 sampled articles, 21 use arguments that can be classified along the lines described in Table 2.2 (the others appear as undetermined in Table 2.3). Of those, 14 observe paradigm discipline. Five of them are realists, five are sociological, three are aligned with liberalism and one is feminist (decolonial feminism). The perception of consistency is particularly strong if we tweak the definition of discipline to allow for some flexibility in combining liberal and sociological arguments over the causes of the Russian war in Ukraine.

Second, as mentioned above, realism appears to be more distinct than the other two key worldviews (in the sense that it is less prone to intermingle with the liberal and sociological approaches than these two are among themselves). We claim that this could be seen as puzzling, as realism has been presented as the common sense of International Relations, as the hegemonic worldview. Its status as the lingua franca of IR could have led to the expectation that it infiltrates other worldviews. It does not play out this role here; if anything, the opposite is true.

Third, while isms are indeed operating, there is little in the way of a debate among them. Sampled articles were not written to compare the explanatory value of different worldviews, rank them, or to engage in any other way with other paradigms. Exceptions are very limited and of two kinds. First, the few articles that do engage with other worldviews do so with arguments that revolve around realism. In other words, this is either something realists do, or something geared towards assessing realism’s understanding of the war. While realism does not seem to be the default paradigm, it is still the one that accounts for the (admittedly low level of) paradigm debate that exists. The second exception points at European integration, with one additional article casually engaging with the divide between liberal intergovernmentalism and constructivism in European Studies.

Finally, European-affiliated authors (both those affiliated to EU and UK institutions) make up just below a third of the total, reflecting the presence of US scholars and think tankers in policy journals. They do not differ much from US-affiliated ones anyway. They are just as likely to follow paradigmatic discipline, and just as unlikely to engage with other isms. Given how small the sample is, perhaps one should not overstate the relevance of there being no consistently realist contributions penned by European-affiliated authors, a relatively higher share of scholars having a sociological approach, or lay great meaning on the fact that the only decolonial feminist article is authored by Europeans.

Conclusion

This chapter has explored the scholarly commentary on the full-fledged Russian invasion of Ukraine as published in academic and policy journals. More specifically, it has interrogated the hypothesis of a return to grand theories and great debates in International Relations. Our premise was that war of annexation, clashes between spheres of influence, the acceleration of great-power competition, and the spectre of great-power war are all ingredients that could push scholars and think tankers into articulating their thoughts on the war around the key tenets of long-lasting, well-articulated worldviews.

Our findings are mostly supportive of this hypothesis, with important qualifications. We do see most of the articles deploying paradigmatically-aligned arguments about the war as regards its causes, its stakes and prescriptions for the West and the US. Furthermore, we see this taking place among realists, liberals and authors of a sociological inclination. Should this last, it could be a harbinger of a less eclectic understanding of theory in International Relations. At the same time, perhaps the most interesting aspects of the story remain in the hints that we get from our sampled articles.

First, the literature does not appear to be under any great shock because of the war, particularly in academic journals. The Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to sit rather naturally within the academic practices of authors, who take it as part of broader, pre-existing categories. The sense of novelty associated with the election of Donald Trump or the COVID-19 pandemic is absent with the Ukraine war. This also explains the extent to which articles tending to address the war in partial ways align with the previous research agendas of academics and think tankers.

Second, part of the role played by realism seems to be a legacy of its former hegemony in the field. While it does not constitute the majority of sampled articles, nor seem to permeate the contributions of other worldviews, it still organizes the low level inter-paradigm debate that exists. Its public salience, as well as its role in the history of IR as an intellectual endeavour, provides realism with the capacity to engage others and be engaged by others.

EU-affiliated authors take part in the sampled publications in ways that do not depart from these contours. In addition, articles only rarely include arguments focusing on the EU (as opposed to passing references made to the EU). When they do, they do not tend to convey a sense of fundamental novelty for the EU. In a way, this resonates with Knud Erik Jørgensen’s argument on the disinterest of European Studies over war as a political phenomenon relevant for the EU. The lack of interest, however, might be reciprocated by students of war and of the changes triggered by this one in particular.

To be sure, the exercise conducted in this chapter is far from complete. There are many journals we have not surveyed, and the next months might still deliver more publications that would lead us to different conclusions. A lengthier longitudinal analysis starting well before the war broke out, but focused on categories such as great-power competition or spheres of influence, might also yield results that question our premise about the state of research before 2022 as being basically eclectic and non-paradigmatic. Nevertheless, there is still value, we think, in painting with big brush strokes a preliminary and interim picture of the ways in which the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine has impacted the work of academics and think tankers in International Relations.